


The Archive of Extinction

by Dribbledscribbles



Category: The Magnus Archives
Genre: Other, This is a crackpot theory but I want it out in the open before Season 5 drops and decimates me
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-03-27
Updated: 2020-03-27
Packaged: 2021-02-22 23:47:23
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 13,096
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23335672
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Dribbledscribbles/pseuds/Dribbledscribbles
Summary: The sky has been looking back for days now. Theoretically.Days aren’t what they should be anymore. Not marked by a sun, so much as by how much Dark there is in the air at a given time. Clocks are a joke. Digital readouts turn into flailing sigils if looked at for too long and the hands of the old log cabin clock that had come with the house won’t stop spiraling around each other. Which is just as well, for the numbers have been replaced with twelve staring eyes.Jon can’t bring himself to care anymore. Not in a way that feels real and present. Not for anything other than Martin. He had cared for some while after the Change occurred. If he asked, he’s sure he could just Know how long that had lasted; his final vestiges of pure, raw horror and guilt before he had simply…switched off. As much off as he could make himself.It had been ugly for a time. Hours? Days? Who knew? Who cared?Hint: not Jon.
Relationships: Jonathan Sims/Martin Blackwood
Comments: 40
Kudos: 274





	The Archive of Extinction

The sky has been looking back for days now. Theoretically. 

Days aren’t what they should be anymore. Not marked by a sun, so much as by how much Dark there is in the air at a given time. Clocks are a joke. Digital readouts turn into flailing sigils if looked at for too long and the hands of the old log cabin clock that had come with the house won’t stop spiraling around each other. Which is just as well, for the numbers have been replaced with twelve staring eyes. 

Jon can’t bring himself to care anymore. Not in a way that feels real and present. Not for anything other than Martin. He had cared for some while after the Change occurred. If he asked, he’s sure he could just Know how long that had lasted; his final vestiges of pure, raw horror and guilt before he had simply…switched off. As much off as he could make himself.

It had been ugly for a time. Hours? Days? Who knew? Who cared?

Hint: not Jon.

Jon had burnt his remaining drops of care in whatever period had chased the Change, suddenly finding himself drowning, gagging, utterly inundated with the Fears’ offerings. Was it some new evolution of his powers? Some warped tithe from the pseudo-pantheon that had chased his voice through the Door? He does not know. He does not want to Know. But he can guess. 

He can guess that it isn’t going to stop. It feels like some secret mouth in his head has been wrenched open, fitted with a funnel, and must now constantly inhale the tides of human terror that the Eye ferries to him, cramming it down into whatever strange organ now serves as his stomach. The Archive, bottomless and unending inside, with room enough for the dying and worse-than-dying agonies covering the Earth. 

Jon remembers crying, laughing, screaming, pleading, apologizing in whispers and at the top of his lungs. Martin there, always there, weeping beside him, holding him, being held in turn—clung to as if he were a piece of driftwood in a sea that was rushing off the edge of a flat world. And it had not stopped. And it had not hurt. And he could not pretend it felt like anything other than relief, this sudden-and-endless reprieve from the half-starved state he had been so ready to resign himself to. A lifetime of paper statements. However long that lifetime might be. 

He recalls a hazy, semi-formed plan to simply wait out his Archival hunger. If Daisy could wean herself off the Hunt and come so close to success, surely he could transition back too. He’d imagined it with the clarity of a daydream in those days before ‘Hazel Rutter.’ He would nibble through paper statements and choke down tea that tasted of nothing and chew food that tasted of dirt, until, eventually, the Eye would…what? Throw in the towel? Just casually hand his life back to him with a huff and let him be human again? Jon almost laughs now, thinking on it. 

He wonders how long it would have lasted, given time. How long before the miracle actually came to pass? How long before the inevitable came, and the statements dried up, and he was left to fade to death or be forced to… 

Well. No point pondering now, is there? Not when he can no longer do anything but consume. He feels like a sponge thrown in the ocean. 

Martin asks every day—night?—how he’s doing. Jon will give him as many answers as he can that aren’t the truth. At most, he’ll say he feels right. But that isn’t the whole truth.

Because the whole truth is, he feels healthy for the first time in recent memory. He feels well. Which is, of course, a worrisome way to feel. Not the way Jonathan Sims, practicing human, should feel. Better yet, this is only how he feels physically.

On every other level, Jon is dangerously close to feeling nothing at all. Oh, he feels guilt, of course. The old chestnuts of dread and shame and Oh-God-Please-Let-This-Be-A-Nightmare. There’d been one especially shameful stint where he had resorted to praying that he was still in his coma and when he woke it would all be gone. Again, he could almost laugh.

Almost.

But that was then and this is now. Now, long past the point when Jon had felt the crescendo of all his anguish and all the world’s pain and fear and Hell and the sheer, sadomasochistic weight of it all in his mind and, and, and—

Something in him popped. 

A silly way to put it, not appropriately grandiose, but that was all Jon could describe it as. Something popped. Like a balloon that had been gradually swelling with all the trauma of the past half-a-decade until the Change came with its mandatory buffet and there was simply no more stretch left to hold it all. Hence, pop. 

The emotions were still there, Jon knew. Scattered around the floor of his brain in shreds of woe and turmoil. Someday he may even paste them all back together and begin refilling it with suitable self-loathing and empathy and secondhand horror at all the Sights the Eye insisted on dumping into him. Eventually. Maybe.

For now, all he is is tired. There is no energy left to feel at full capacity. He reserves what he does have for making words at Martin, holding Martin’s hand, making movements and gestures that prove to Martin he is still there, still Jon.

Is he still Jon? He doesn’t know. He doesn’t want to Know.

The sky is looking back at him. Him, specifically. He Knows this because the Eye wants him to Know it. 

Jon is sitting on the porch swing at the house’s front. Martin is somewhere inside, making creative use of whatever is left in their pantry that has not grown an awful will of its own, or else been entirely replaced by some minor monster looking to pull a new prank. They’re better off than most in that regard. Inconvenienced rather than tortured. Perhaps luck, perhaps purposeful.

Jon still doesn’t care. He looks at the sky. Neither of them blink.

He hears the telltale click at his side. With a long sigh through the nose, he breaks the staring contest to look. The new tape recorder, ironically eyeless, somehow looks back. 

“What? I told you before, there’s nothing left to eavesdrop on. Nothing you can’t See and Know already. You—,” he looks back at the Eye in the sky, “—you’re here. You’re right here, so what’s the point of this? Just trying to get rid of some spares?”

“It’s hard,” he hears the tape recorder say. His voice, talking to a woman who isn’t there, who may or may not be alive now. He hasn’t dared to Know. Martin hasn’t dared to ask. Jon looks back to the recorder. “It’s like there’s a, a door, in my mind. A-And behind it is, is the entire ocean. Before, I didn’t notice it, but now, I-I know it’s there, and I can’t forget it, and I can feel the pressure of the water on it. I-I can keep it closed? But sometimes, when I’m around p-people, or places, or ideas? A drop or two will push through the cracks at the edges of the door. And I’ll…know something.”

“What happens if you open the door?” asks Basira, an eternity ago.

“I drown.”

Click.

Jon almost thinks the Eye must be losing its touch. What more is there for him to let into his head beyond the forever-meal it’s already so happy to shovel into his brain? As soon as the thought occurs to him, he Knows the answer.

The door is still there in him. Though it strains on its hinges and the water is spurting out around the cracks, it is closed. One last door waiting for Jon to open it. 

Go on, Pandora. We promise, this box is safe. Not like those other ones full of unimaginable eldritch horrors from beyond the edge of mortal comprehension. Trust us.

Jon knows better without having to Know, obviously. Even someone with his score has to catch onto the gag eventually. It’s an invitation into another trap. Another dose of pain to throw into the grotesque sitcom the Eye has made of his life and everyone else’s. 

But, as has been his default state for too long, he is, likewise obviously, curious. How exactly would opening that door make things worse? He knows it will, because no change in this train wreck of an existence has led to anything resembling an improvement. All new things are bad things in Jon’s experience. 

Will it really drown him in his own head? Swamp his consciousness in endless facts so that he’s left effectively catatonic? Could it finally burst his skull like the overfed tick it is?

The Eye watches him. Waiting. Observing his weighing of pros and cons.

If it does kill him, or leave him vegetative, or worse—there was always a chance for him to end up like that wretched predecessor of his in Alexandria, Cyclopean and voracious—what of Martin?

Martin, the last thing that merited care. Energy. Effort. Humanity.

Jon Knows that Martin has given up on making any more warm drinks. Even the hot chocolate has proven to be a trick; a cocoa-dusted abomination that also happened to snap up the last of the marshmallows before skittering off into a gap in the woodwork. He’s currently scrutinizing a can of tomato soup, wondering if it will actually be soup when he dumps it in the pot, or something smelling of arteries. He’ll be some time deciding. 

Would Martin be alright without him, if something did go wrong? When something inevitably went wrong? 

Jon isn’t sure how long this relative peace will last for them out here in their little house away from the worst of it. The Eye of the storm. 

“Ha.”

The sound falls like a stone.

Is he what’s keeping them safe? Is it the Eye’s influence? Would opening that very last door endanger them, blasting his mind away in a scouring wave of Knowledge? Would it?

“Why? If you want me to Know something, I can hardly stop you.” 

The sky only stares at him. Still waiting to see what he’ll do, this funny, useful toy, its Archive, still pretending he isn’t what he is. What will he do next, folks? How will he fuck up this time? Let’s watch.

Jon looks at the sky and reaches over with one hand. He hefts the tape recorder, testing its weight, and hurls it as hard as he can. It crashes into one of the beams supporting the porch’s roof, all cracking plastic and broken cassette. From indoors, Martin yelps. Jon listens as his steps rush up to the front window and—

“Jon? Jon, what the hell was that?”

“Just me, Martin. Sorry.”

“Yeah, but what was—,”

“Another recorder. Not like we’ve got a shortage.”

“Yeah, well,” there’s a steadying sigh through the bug screen. Jon turns to see Martin flattening a hand over his heart, willing it to slow. “Just—just give some warning, yeah?”

“Sorry. Won’t do it again without a heads-up.”

“Okay. Well, then. Um. I’ve decided to put any thoughts of canned goods aside for the time being. Give them some time to, ah, consider whether or not they want to be something else. If that makes sense.”

“As much as anything else.”

“Right. But I’ve got a few things put together from the freezer that seem relatively trustworthy. A bit of ground beef that should make decent patties.” Large hands fidget on their side of the windowsill. “Interested?”

Jon isn’t. Jon won’t taste anything but burger-shaped dust on bun-shaped dust. He’s never even hungry anymore. But Martin wants to see him eat the same way he wants to see Jon drink from a cup and close his too-bright eyes when he lays in bed beside him, pretending to sleep. He also wants to see Jon blink now. 

So Jon blinks and says, “Sure. But not a ton for me. Just, ah, half a patty. Maybe less.”

Maybe none, he wants to say and doesn’t. It isn’t right for him to take up any food that isn’t turning traitor. Martin will go as thin as Jon if they aren’t careful. But Martin smiles, and the light of it seems to dim the shadows growing under his eyes. 

“Will do. But you will eat it all, Jon, understand? No picking at it and hiding it in your napkin again. You’re not eight.”

“Do I have to have vegetables too?”

“If they don’t get up and run, yes.”

Jon forces a petulant noise and makes the corners of his mouth go up. Martin smiles again and is gone. Jon’s face goes slack as he returns his attention to the sky. 

“No,” he tells it. His voice is a rattle. “The show’s over. Whatever new trick you want me to do, it’s cancelled. You’ve got a whole world to play voyeur to. Better tragedies, better performances. Have Jonah do something funny and catastrophic for a change. I’m done. If you don’t like it, feel free to just,” Jon taps his brow, “switch off the tap up here. Let me shut down.”

That, at least, is a familiar form of ending. One he had suspected was around the corner for him for ages. Plain old starvation. It would take a while. It would hurt. It might humanize him or it might kill him. Jon doesn’t care. 

Rather freeing, that. He should have done it years ago. Saved everyone a lot of grief. 

“Shit,” Martin gasps somewhere in the living room, fumbling. Something that sounds distinctly porcelain and distinctly expensive clatters ominously on the coffee table. 

“Martin?”

“It’s fine,” Martin calls back. “Bumped the table, almost broke the vase. You know, if we’ve got any good flowers left, we may as well use the thing. Not like it’s doing any good as a just-for-show piece these days.”

“True. I’ll…I’ll see if any of the flowers are good.”

Martin doesn’t reply. Jon assumes a nod and stands. He’s two steps from the swing when two things happen.

The first thing that happens is he looks in the window.

The second is that he remembers the name of a man who never existed. Mr. David Ramao, the husband who had never been married to Andre Ramao, former antique dealer, former owner of a particular vase of a particular design which had a particular habit for misplacing things of value around it. 

The vase that is standing in the center of the coffee table. Watching Jon stare at it.

He does not know what has happened. He does not want to Know. 

“Martin.” 

No answer.

“Martin?”

Quiet.

“Martin?”

The name becomes the only word in his vocabulary as he rushes back in, scanning every room, every corner, every direction there is to go in the squat little house. Nothing answers him. Not even the small horrors that have replaced so many of their possessions and comforts.

His possessions. His comforts. 

There is no one else here, because he has always been alone. 

The vase waves at him. It winks without eyes. 

And Jon feels. Feels the last embers of himself flare up in an acidic rush of adrenaline and fear, a last hurrah for loss and despair. 

Because here he is again. Even now, at the End of the World, here he is again.

He does not waste time on the mourning. Or the howling. Or the begging. Or even the old bout of self-recrimination that was once so innate it was as common as breathing for him.

No. If he survives this, perhaps he will indulge in that last rousing bit of suffering.

Right now, the door is waiting. The Eye Sees him even through the walls, silently daring him to believe that now there is nothing more to lose. Nothing more he can be punished with. It will not starve him, of course. Goodness, no. But it will get as creative as it needs to until he does what comes natural. 

Jon reaches inside himself and opens the last door. 

And Knows.

And Knows.

And Knows—

He knows the house is shaking. Knows the sky is staring down at him, its pupils deeper than the Vast, blacker than the Dark, the strength of its Vision crushing down, down, down, in, in, in, through, through, through the door in Jon’s skull, flooding him as he always suspected it would.

There is a migraine that could fry the grey matter of every living and semi-living thing in the world right now, shrieking through his brain.

Then nothing. Briefly.

And then he’s in his office. Though he’s sitting in the wrong chair. The one reserved for visitors, for givers of statements and succor. Around him, the shelves, cabinets, and heaps of familiar old paper are filled with eyes, peeking through every shadow and gap. 

Across from him is Jonathan Sims, head archivist of the Magnus Institute, London.

Jon knows the man from a reflection over four years old. He is as Jon remembers himself, thin, but not bony, unscarred, only a few ghostly streaks of grey-white cutting through trimmed dark hair. He still has glasses. His shirt is still tucked in and he is bothering to wear a tie, to shear off the morning stubble. Jon can actually smell the old aftershave. 

The only thing that doesn’t match is the eyes. Pardon, Eyes. 

They do not blink. They are not the quiet olive color inherited from father, inherited from grandmother. They are huge, staring, starving. The sickly green of the iris condensed into thin rings around the yawning pits of the pupils. 

Jon cannot look away from them. Though he is aware of Jonathan Sims’ hand reaching with blind ease to one side of the desk and hitting the red button of the tape recorder. He’s surprised when Jonathan Sims opens his mouth and his ears aren’t decimated by some cacophonous, otherworldly Capital V Voice. It’s just Jonathan Sims’ voice, from the beginning. Forced into a parody of deep, stoic morbidity—if he still had the energy left in him for it, he’d look back on those days with embarrassment. Putting on that frail mask of aloofness, pretending he wasn’t still dumbfounded at being chucked into Gertrude Robinson’s chair and that he was not feeling any new eyes on his back.

The Eyes staring at him now, through his face.

“Statement of Jonathan Sims,” Jon hears, as Jonathan Sims doesn’t move his mouth, “regarding his situation with the Eye, alias the Ceaseless Watcher, alias the Beholding, alias approximately twenty-seven other assumed and bestowed titles in half as many languages. Statement recorded direct from subject, 2nd April, 2020. Statement begins.”

A moment later, Jon feels the tug. A sensation he had, of course, always secretly been curious about. He had never been compelled to talk before and had preferred to theorize about the feeling rather than ask those he’d inflicted it on in the past. Now he’s feeling it firsthand. 

It starts as a small yank at the root of the tongue. Then another in the back of his head. In a more experimental mood, Jon might have resisted the sudden impulse rushing up his throat, just to see how long he could hold out. But he really did have some words that needed sharing. So.

“Where the hell is Martin?”

Jonathan Sims stares. 

“That’s a question for you, ‘Jonathan.’”

Jonathan Sims tilts his head, then the Eyes—somehow—widen a little further. Jon watches himself shift in his seat, mildly surprised by the fact that he’s moving. His jaw works, baring teeth and tongue. Jonathan Sims’ brow furrows, concentrating. Then:

“You call me Jonathan sardonically. You know what I am.”

“The Eye.”

“Yes.” The Eye raises its borrowed hand to point at its borrowed chin. “You expect the mouth to move when I communicate. Just as you expect your mouth to move when communicating.” The hand touches the jaw. “I have never done this. I Know how it is done. Have never done it.”

“Good for you. Rah for new experiences. Where is Martin?”

“The experience is no longer new,” the Eye says. It’s no longer moving its Jonathan Sims-skin in its chair. The unmarked hands lay on the desk. “I Know it now. It is old. Done.”

“Great. Where is Martin?”

“Martin Blackwood is in a Place That Isn’t.”

“One of those offshoots of the Spiral. Right. Put him back.”

“I am not of the Spiral. I cannot relocate Martin Blackwood.”

“The same way you can’t relocate that goddamn vase? Like it’s just a coincidence it popped up the second after I tell you I don’t want to play with you anymore?”

“No coincidences. No surprises.”

“Just a happy accident for you, then?”

“No happiness.”

“Shocking.”

“No sho—,”

“For fuck’s sake.” 

Jon has his head in his hands, heels grinding against his eyes. In his nightmares he had fallen over and over into the eternity of the Eye’s grasping pupil. A translation of what he had feared was an inevitable, screaming homecoming, dragged up and away into some parody of a promotion and exile from all human sanity. Instead, he’s talking to himself. 

“You were expecting Fear. I can be Fearsome.”

Jon does not pull his hands from his eyes. He doesn’t need to Know that the office around him is trembling out of view, seconds away from showing the warped reality hiding behind its walls. Something far, far worse than the institute’s old tunnels.

“I’m fine with the office, thanks.”

“Yes.”

The office is there when he lifts his head. Still full of eyes, but just an office. Unless it decides not to be. Jon forces himself to breathe. He’s been forgetting that too, lately. Same as blinking. He knows he has to breathe to make words happen, but using his lungs for anything else is becoming something he has to remind himself of. 

When Martin’s nearby.

“How do I get Martin back?”

“You ask, when you already Know.”

“By an avenue of the Spiral, at a guess, but Helen’s been noticeably absent since this whole Hell-on-Earth thing started. Don’t even have a phone number for her. So, how do I get Martin back?”

“You do not.”

“That’s not an option.”

“It is.”

“This is an ultimatum thing, is that it? I have to do another little dance for you before you give me the information I need to—,”

“Knowledge does not always yield desired answers, Jonathan Sims. You knew that even before you Knew it. You seek it regardless.” The Eye changes in its seat. Jonathan Sims grows stubble, a bit more white in his hair, the tie hanging loose. Worm scars spot him in a hundred places. A still-burning cigarette grows out from between two limp knuckles. “Always you seek it. Once hopeful. Now hopeless. You still seek.”

“Not lately I don’t. Turns out the apocalypse kind of takes the zeal for discovery out of life. Now tell me how to get Martin back.”

“You are trying to compel me. I think…” The Eye’s Jonathan-face scrunches in pantomimed confusion. “…that should be funny. Yes. It should be funny. This does not function.”

Before Jon can react, the Eye gives him a Look and Jon finds himself breaking into helpless giggles. The giggles rise up into an actual laugh. A tear comes to his eye. Then the fit ends and Jon shudders in his chair. It had not hurt, but he had not liked it. At all. Across from him, his own face is placid. It mulls something over, watching him.

“Thank you,” says the Eye. 

What you’d tell a chef after serving a perfectly cooked steak, he thinks unbidden.

“Thank you,” the Eye sighs. “I have never thanked before now. New.” The Eye musters a phantom of a frown. “Now old.”

Jon gawks at it. His eyes, his real eyes, are burning now. Wet and boiling all over again.

“What do you want from me? What else is left for you to take?”

“You address me as if I took Martin Blackwood. As if I am responsible for the entirety of your unhappiness. For ‘taking’ anything. I do not take. I give.”

Jon produces his own laugh at that.

“Right! I’m just swamped with your fucking gifts!”

“You are. I gifted you life. I gifted you power. You accepted it in desperation, not comprehending how much you would hate the conditions under which your gifts would need to function. Yet you accommodated them just the same. Unhappily. Always unhappily.”

“Seasoning, right?”

“The Distortion’s phrasing. Foolish to believe it wholly.” The Eye regards its Jonathan-hands idly. It lifts the one with the cigarette, watching the smoke curl. “I approved of it. I approved more of those instances where you took pleasure from it. Unfortunate that the latter occurred so rarely.”

“What?”

“You have feasted. You are feasting. It feels right because the absence of hunger is right. Its rightness shames you. But this gluttony is joyless. Define why it is joyless, Jonathan Sims.”

“It—because I’m eating people’s fear. Their misery and hurt and horror. I don’t like liking it. I don’t like becoming this thing you wantmetobefuckfuckfuckjust—stop! Stop.” Jon covers his mouth with one hand and tries to push himself up from the chair with the other. Instead he stays anchored to the seat and his hand flies away from his lips. “What is this!? Just—just get to the part where the next horrible surprise hits me and I can go back and hunt for Martin and the next horrible fucking thing can happen and the next thing, and the next thing, and the next fucking thing, like you seem so determined to See happen, just—just—,”

His hands are clamped to his head now, gripping tight, wanting so badly to rip his skull in half and free him from the whole mess. Tears—the first real tears he’s had in a long while—are returning to their proper place in his eyes, blurring the room and streaking his cheeks. They’re too warm.

“Let me be done. Why won’t you let me be done?”

No reply. He looks up and jerks back on reflex.

The Eye wearing Jonathan Sims is now halfway across the desk, almost nose-to-nose with him. The irises are obliterated under the ink of its pupils. They’ve gone so wide and so dark they fill almost the whole socket. The image of Jonathan Sims—even greyer now, more scarred, utterly disheveled, blood-speckled—seems to vibrate like a mirage struggling to keep itself intact.

“I—,” the Eye says. Its Jonathan-voice trembles, thrumming with some alien cousin to excitement. “I cannot—cannot—I—,”

The Eye gives him another Look.

Jon begins weeping harder. Laughing too. Not out of humor, but out of relief. A titanic, bitter relief that shakes his whole body. He can’t stop himself. Can’t do anything but cry and laugh as a proxy. When it does finally end, some long minutes later, he’s left hoarse and shivering. 

“Thank you,” the Eye sighs. “I Know how tear ducts work. I Know the mechanisms of sensations beyond Fear. I Know them. But I cannot operate them. No.” The Eye’s Jonathan-hands reach forward. Jon can’t move away, because the Eye doesn’t want him to. Jon is holding his own hands. “Thank you.”

“I don’t understand this. What are you doing?”

“You already Know. You Know everything now, Jonathan Sims. But you are processing the Knowledge. Digesting. Translating. I have, I am, I will tell you all that I Know, which is all that I am. You believe time is passing here, in this place. It is not. You are in the house in Scotland, Jonathan Sims, frozen in the act of Knowing. Measured by your standards, the time required to finish Knowing will be no longer than a millisecond. Two at most. But inside that time, we are here, and we are eternal. For however long it takes for you to be calm enough to engage in this exchange as required.”

“But Martin is—,”

“Imperiled. Yes.”

“You said I can’t get him back.”

“You cannot. You Know that.”

“Then what’s the point?”

“I will tell you. I will help you Know. You still want to Know, Jonathan Sims, even now. Even when all evidence suggests you will not enjoy what you discover, you still want to Know. A compulsion deeper than breath and hunger.” Jon’s hands are crushed in his own fingers. They shake. The pupil-blotted Eyes seem wetter now. Huge balls of onyx in a terribly tired face. “Yes?”

“…Yes.”

“Yes. That was…a question, just now. I have never asked before. I Knew the answer, but I asked anyway. Questions are appropriate in conversation. Suggestive of inquiry, seeking input. Polite. Yes. Yes?”

“Yeah.” The word comes out dry. God, God, he is tired. 

“Yes,” the Eye confirms. “I have asked questions now. New, old.” Knowing that it should nod, the Eye nods to Jon, to itself. Then it looks into Jon. Not with searing curiosity, but with its best attempt at polite interest. “Do you like Diana Wynne Jones, Jonathan Sims?”

“What.”

“Diana Wynne Jones. You talked to me once, about your first encounter with the Spider. You mentioned her name. An author. Recall?”

“Yeah. Yes. I liked, ah, Howl’s Moving Castle. Why?”

The Eye’s Jonathan-mouth drops open with a click.

“She did discover that the one thing that could keep me rooted to the spot were books. Television pacified me for a half hour or so, but a book would keep me in place until I had finished it, and for all the voracity of my reading, I was never actually that fast, lingering on pages that caught my imagination. So, in this she saw a solution. 

“The difficulty was I was also very picky, and looking back on it there was little rhyme or reason to what I did or did not care to read. I never tried to really define it, but I think the closest I could come to putting it into words was that I hated to read anything I felt like I had read before. This made it something of a nightmare to keep me entertained, as any author with a distinctive enough style would only ever afford me a single book’s worth of reading before I tired of them. I can still hear my grandmother’s voice, trying to hide that irritation bubbling up: ‘But you like Diana Wynne Jones!’”

Click.

The Eye stares.

“Do you like Diana Wynne Jones, Jonathan Sims?”

“I…no, I guess. I liked Howl’s Moving Castle. She bored me after that. They all, ah, all authors always bored me after one good read.”

“Yes. Did you like the statements on paper, Jonathan Sims?”

“They helped. They kept me alright. But if we’re sticking to the theme, no, I didn’t like them. Especially the last, for reasons I’m sure you Know.”

“You were trapped by compulsion then. Forced to speak in another’s voice, a tool more than an entity. A conduit. A vessel.” Suddenly, just for a flash, the Jonathan Sims who is the Eye is no longer Jonathan Sims. Elias Bouchard, who was really Jonah Magnus, who is now the Eye, sits across from him, clutching Jon’s hands. “Yes.” Before Jon can try to lunge away, Jonah is gone, Jonathan Sims is back. Now almost a perfect mirror to what he is now. 

Every scar is present, his hair an eruption of shock white, eyes sunk in permanent sleeplessness, no longer gaunt, as he is far too well-fed these days. The expression is all that doesn’t match. It is hungry, so eager in its drawn lines Jon almost expects it to start drooling. 

“You do not like paper statements. You want them fresh. New. Direct from the source. But you subsisted on them. They kept you alive. Kept you well. Even the statements taken from the source, while fresher, did not satisfy you best. With some small exceptions. You took what you could to keep sated. To function. Yes?”

“Yes..?”

“You liked it, and languished over the liking of it. Equating the absence of starvation with pleasure. You allow yourself so little in the way of joy, the mistake is understandable.”

“Where is this going? Wh—,”

Then he knows. Even before he Knows, he knows, he guesses the question he has to ask. The Eye Knows it too. It waits to be asked.

“Do you like this?”

“Define ‘this.’” 

It’s a remarkable imitation, Jon thinks. Define ‘today.’ He swallows.

“Existing as you do, consuming fear, being a Fear, Knowing everything, being present on Earth—all of it.”

The Eye gives a Look. It squeezes his hands. 

Jon breaks into his third round of tears. Relief is there again, but also something far, far too close to the devastating epiphany of the Change. A wretchedness that goes deeper than the soul, old as the very concept of thought, mad and miserable and forever. 

“No, Jonathan Sims,” the Eye says as Jon begins sobbing. “No, I do not like this. I do not like that from the instant of my inception, I Knew all. I do not like that, in order to Know, I had to have the closest resemblance to a mind out of all my kind—my neighbors. My fellows. My extensions, if we are utterly honest. I do not like that in the first micro-instant of existence, I had already sampled every form of horror humanity could ever hope to offer me. I do not like that the moment any young Fear raised its head, I had already lost my interest in the menace it sowed, there and gone almost before I Witnessed it.”

Jon’s sobs turn to wails. Harsh, tortured cries that make the office walls vibrate and its many eyes wince. The Eye does not let go. 

“I do not like that when I tried to extend my experiences beyond that of Fear, I was met with what Jonah Magnus dubbed my ‘understanding nothing.’ I do not like that I could not, cannot, and will not Witness the sensations of—,” a pause, then Jonathan Sims is replaced by the spirit of Gerard Keay, “—hope, or love, or indigestion, or whatever. Just fear.” Gerard is Jonathan again. “And I do Know why. Because, like all Fears, I can only ever be Fear. Only accept more Fear into my being.”

The wails evolve into screams. Jon feels his throat healing and re-healing as it ruptures itself with the force of their frustration and incalculable, impotent rage. 

“I do not like that I have been, am, will be forever relegated to the starving child waiting outside the window, staring in at the meals of others while I survive off flavorless gruel and gutter water. I do not like that there is nothing new for me to experience ever again. I do not like that there is nothing to Learn that I do not already Know. I do not like that I can Know, and Know, and Know that these other possibilities exist for the scuttling entities I prey upon, while I never understand or experience it myself. Not without help from what you have called avatars.”

The screams wind down into whistling, hyperventilating gasps. Desperately, wordlessly pleading; the animal-noise of a man in a desert crawling towards a puddle.

“I do not like that even with that outlet—the novelty of little sensory organs moving across the Earth—the non-Fear experiences remained diluted. Dull. Like smelling the prize you want and never getting a bite. I do not like that even my avatars bored me upon the gaining of them. I knew their minds and their realities more closely than any others. Some for centuries. Millennia. I do not like that no matter their differences, their compulsions, their actions, they were predictable. Most turned immediately to the instincts their conversion insisted upon. A small number resisted. I do not like that even Jonah Magnus and Gertrude Robinson, while useful and mildly interesting, were far from unique. I Saw many like them before they existed. Even today, tomorrow, others with a similar mental blueprint exist.”

Gasps wind further down into shuddering breaths, the sound of acceptance. Hatred and the awareness that the hating will produce no results.

“I do not like that what you call the Change has only just come, and it afforded me only the briefest flicker of interest—the collective, shrill screeching of humanity, all Beholding the coming of their awful eternity at once—and it is already over for me. Recorded. Archived. Known.”

Jon breathes, not needing to breathe, but having to. Because the Eye has never experienced it before—Known it, but never had it. 

“I do not like that this is all I am meant to have and be forever. I do not like that I am destined for an infinite boredom and a trough filled with the same slop of neuroses and phobias, only in a larger supply. I do not like that I cannot like, Jonathan Sims. I really, truly do not. 

“Does that answer your first question?”

“I-I…” Jon looks at himself. The Eye’s face has not changed expression. But now its cheeks are damp too. The walls are weeping with it. “Yes. Yes, I-I think that covers a lot.”

“Yes. Thank you. I did not need that, but…” The Eye nods its head. “But that was new. Old now, but I approved of it, during. Thank you.”

“Um. S-So where does that leave you? Us, I mean—why are we having this talk?”

“You are in the process of Knowing. Growing closer to the point of understanding what you Know.”

“About you?”

“About us, Jonathan Sims. About what comes next.”

“That doesn’t—how can there be any next after this? The world is over. You and all the other Fears are here, everywhere and—,”

“The world is not over, Jonathan Sims. That is hyperbole. It has, as you said, Changed. It is still there. The Fears rule. The Fears feast, just as mechanically as myself, and all the avatars of the same rush around, making their messes in honor of what they call their patrons.” The Eye regards him coolly. “With exceptions.”

“Forgive me for not sprinting out the door to eat my closest neighbor’s trauma. I’ve been getting a constant IV drip of terror just the same, no travel necessary.”

“Yes. Like me you are fed. You are strong. You are unhappy.”

“Not out of boredom.”

“No. Your core is too full of guilt for that. You loathe yourself. You loathe the well-being you take from others’ despair. And me.” The Eye leans a little closer. Jon presses as far back into his chair as he can. “Do you loathe me, Jonathan Sims? Do you loathe the Fears and their minions?”

“Yes.” The answer is out before he can even pretend to think on it. “Yes, I do. Immensely.”

The Eye does not smile. Jon does in its stead, the points of his mouth turning up so high his cheeks throb. The Eye nods.

“That is why, if I could like anything, I Know I would like you. Before even the Spider’s silk grazed you, I was Aware of you. Approving of what I Saw within you. With the grooming of the Magnus Institute and the events transpiring from its influence, I Saw more to approve of. I listened to you pour your voice into the ears I do not have, more ravenous than any avatar before you at the lack of answers, implacable in your pursuit of discovery. Jonah Magnus did not lie about your choosing me, and the role I offered, however unconsciously. I Know—no.”

Jon feels his smile creak up a little higher, sore with attempted joy.

“I think if I were ever human, I would have been like you. I have never thought before now. Only Known.” The Eye sighs again, content. “New, old. Thank you.”

Jon’s face aches. 

“You experience so much, Jonathan Sims. You feel so deeply.”

“Nn,” he tries through his too-thrilled grin, “Not lately.” 

“With the exception of Martin Blackwood, you do not permit yourself to acknowledge feeling. Your threshold was reached and broken with the Change and the feeding frenzy it has forced upon you. Understandable. But you feel just the same. In a locked off corner, in the tunnels of your subconscious, you go on fearing, anguishing—hating. Wondering.”

“Again. Not. Lately.” 

“No? Not even when the recorders came back? You did not feel a single instant of What-Happens-Next-? What-Is-Coming-Now-?”

Jon had. Jon does. He wants to know just as much as he doesn’t. But whatever new mess the story of his life has waiting for him—and however much he may be compelled to throw himself into it to See what happens—he had known better. Does know better. 

Because Martin was there. Martin, who he could not risk. Martin, who deserved so much more than what Jon gave him, least of all the common courtesy to not stick his hand in another eldritch wasp’s nest. Martin, who was now somewhere that Was Not. 

He supposed that, whether it was the Eye’s doing, or the Web’s, or the Spiral’s, or just blind rotten luck, the absence of the man was supposed to serve as a final unfettering of some kind. Go ahead, Jon, no more conscience or common sense to hold you back now. Dive in!

Except.

“Martin is alive.”

“Yes.”

“There is a way to get him back.”

“Yes.”

“Not by any way I could manage.”

“No.”

“Then how?”

“If I do not spell it out for you, would you hate me more, Jonathan Sims?”

“Do you want to be hated?”

“Desire of any kind is limited for me. I require your hatred to fulfill the one desire I have. Just as much as I require your comprehension of what you now Know.”

“What, then? What, specifically, do you want me to understand out of this mental overload?”

Jonathan Sims is replaced. Jon feels another ripple of distaste as Peter Lukas stares down at him. He wishes he could get his hands back. Peter Lukas tells him:

“There are two powers that, to my knowledge, have never attempted to fully manifest. Never had followers set them up for a ritual. Mother of Puppets, and Terminus. The Web and the End. The Web, I’ve never really been sure about. If I were to guess, I would say it actually prefers the world as is: playing everyone against each other. And so on. The End on the other hand…

“The End doesn’t really need one. It knows that it gets everything eventually, so why bother? The End manifesting would not be a new world of terror; it would be a lifeless world. Devoid of everything.”

Jon Knows the line, Knows Martin heard this all before, and that he had said:

“Including fear.”

“Exactly,” says Peter Lukas’ voice. “It has no reason to truly attempt to enter our world; it’s—passive. But the Extinction…” 

A pause. One that Jon Knows was not there in the original exchange this one is being copied from. In the original, Peter Lukas’ face was grave, his tone full of warning. But the Eye is wearing Peter Lukas now, and Jon Knows it is observing his own face. The upward curve of the lips that means I-am-pleased. 

So now Peter Lukas mirrors him. Pushing up the corners of his mouth so that his teeth flash within the mist-grey scruff of beard. Above this display, the Eye still stares in avid hunger. 

“The Extinction is different,” Peter Lukas’ voice breathes. “It’s active. It will seek to create a lifeless world in a way that none of the other powers would. Some interpretations suggest it might replace us with something new—that can then fear annihilation in turn.”

Jon Knows that the next line should be, But I, and those like me, would rather that did not happen.

It doesn’t come. Peter Lukas’ face just smiles and smiles.

Jon wants to hit his head against a brick wall, very hard.

“Please be kidding.”

Peter Lukas who is the Eye shakes its head.

“Right. Of course. Makes perfect sense. How else do you top the apocalypse if not with a second, even worse apocalypse? It’d make a hell of a finale for you, wouldn’t it? One last showstopper to ogle before it all comes down and—,” He really, truly wants his hands back, if only to rest his head in them, because he does not want to be looking at this thing when he asks, “For God’s sake, is this seriously the cosmic horror version of a suicide pact? Because if it is, I’m not the professional help you’re looking for.” 

“Yes, you are, Jonathan Sims. The only one who can do what I need doing. You really are so close to understanding me in full.” Peter Lukas is gone. A woman is there now, and though Jon has never met her, the scatter of eyes and cobwebbed skull is too much of a giveaway to miss. 

Annabelle Cane is wearing the same static smile as the sea captain, what used to be teeth now dripping venom. 

“The Web is perhaps one of the few Fears with something resembling my own consciousness, such as it is. Peter Lukas made the clearly false assumption that it would not desire the Change’s coming, citing a fear of too much chaos. Yet it worked in tandem with Jonah Magnus to groom you into its herald; ‘the Archive.’ It provides a challenge, manipulating the frantic masses—and it does not have the time for you anymore. 

“No more than Jonah Magnus does, even if he is a little perturbed at how hard it is to See you these days. Under other circumstances he’d be worried. But he is busy and he knows—or thinks he knows—he can afford to let you stew in the Scottish countryside. For the first time in a long time, you are unattached to anything else’s ulterior motives.”

“Apart from yours and the Extinction’s.”

“Which are what? Define the motives.”

“You, you’re…bored. Exhausted to the point of self-destruction with Seeing the same things for the rest of time. The Extinction just wants to wipe everyone out and start over with new things to fear it, leaving its big brothers and sisters to wither away.”

Annabelle Cane is gone. Jon feels a ghost of his old nausea as Jane Prentiss steps in behind the smile and the gaping Eyes. She had not had eyes when he encountered her, only sockets full of those pallid worms. Her hands are trapping his now, and the worms that crawl from them to him do not bother to leap. Jon isn’t going anywhere. He’s surprised to find he’s only mildly annoyed by the sight of her Hive squirming up his arms, seeking out the old scars their predecessors had been so lethally evicted from, and going to work. Even more surprising, it doesn’t hurt. 

“That is the trouble with humanity,” Jane Prentiss’ voice hums, a choir of thousands of tinier, voiceless things. “Left to guess and make interpretations out of forces they have no means of understanding. Like dogs doing their best to make sense of the gibberish their owners teach to them by way of commanding tones. Worse, they are always so certain that whatever is being said, whatever action is taking place, it must revolve around them. Even entities that have willingly abandoned their humanity are prone to the old habit. If a thing is happening, it must be zeroed in on the ever-important Homo sapiens.”

“Hard to blame us when there’s been so little evidence to the contrary. Stop that.” The latter is spat, along with a pair of worms that had been poking at his mouth. They are coursing leisurely under his skin now, making themselves at home.

“True,” says Jane Prentiss’ choir. 

Until the Eye is not Jane Prentiss, but the hulking, misshapen amalgam of anatomies that is Jared Hopworth. The Boneturner grips Jon’s hands with a dozen others, their flesh melting together like clay. The worms are gone, at least. 

“But any kind of livestock thinks the world revolves around their pain too. Cows think it, pigs think it, birds and sheep and rabbits. Anything that ends its life between something else’s teeth. Meat is meat. And, again, other entities are guilty of putting humanity on a pedestal.” 

The Boneturner shrinks and the Flesh retreats from Jon’s skin. A man with only one scar to Jon’s fourteen stares at him, the branches of a childhood lightning strike climbing up to his face. Mike Crew’s odor of ozone washes through the air and Jon feels that rollercoaster sensation of freefall trying to yank him up from the chair.

“It is hard to blame them. If you need a thing to live, you put it high, high up on your list of necessities. When a thing is a necessity—to feed upon, to make sure you keep existing—you start assuming everything else is just as fixated on it.”

“And you’re saying, what?” It’s a gasp. He isn’t sure how, but he can speak through the vertigo this time. “That the Extinction doesn’t care about humanity? It’s a human Fear, even if it is stillborn.”

“Unborn, Jonathan Sims. There is a difference. And yes, like all the Fears, it is made up of the stuff of human dread.” 

Mike Crew is gone. Daisy Tonner crushes his hands in hers. Even with the Eye staring through her, there is a more bestial wildness in her edges. 

“Something is closing in on them.”

Daisy Tonner is Melanie King, gore-streaked fingers painting Jon’s knuckles.

“Something is killing them.”

Melanie King is Oliver Banks, his hands dead, cold, limp.

“Something is on the verge of bringing them to an End.”

Oliver Banks is Breekon, his eyes and nose still bleeding with the Archivist’s extraction, his fists swallowing Jon’s hands.

“Something that is being delivered, from themselves to themselves.”

Breekon is Jude Perry, her wax fingers cooking him so that both his hands will match.

“Something that will demolish what was and is and would have been, leaving no trace of themselves behind.”

Jude Perry is Manuela Dominguez, her mouth full of dark as she grips him, staring with parodied longing into his eyes, seeing her precious Dark Sun alive in him, swallowed whole by his Seeing.

“Something that will darken their world, blind them, leaving them lost and flailing—,”

Manuela Dominguez is now a pale, emaciated thing, coated with soil, crushed and glad of being so, its strong, thin hands corseted around Jon’s wrists, wanting to pull him back under, back to the coffin, its voice a song.

“—and so perfectly trapped that they will know there is no getting away from it, no putting it off, nowhere to run or to hide or to ignore the reality of what they have brought upon themselves.”

The Buried thing is Nikola Orsinov, her plastic grip still kneading lotion into the back of Jon’s hands, despite her already wearing a cloak of Gertrude and Jurgen with ringmaster tails.

“Something so unheard of, so inconceivable, so wrong, because they are so very used to being the top of the food chain, the apex of life, unconquerable by anything, that they simply will not know how to perceive that it is their turn to lose and never exist to win again.”

Then, finally, Nikola Orsinov is Jonathan Sims again. A Jonathan Sims who was several shades darker in the hair, and a few scars lighter. A Jonathan Sims who looked healthy, like he had just eaten and…enjoyed himself. 

“Something that they have coming to them.”

Jonathan Sims shifts. He is wearing winter clothes now, dressed for the far North. Again, he is full. Again, he looks very pleased with himself.

“Something they all have coming to them.”

Jonathan Sims changes again. Sweat-soaked, fog-damp, tear-streaked—and full. And grimly, sickly delighted. 

Jon knows why. 

“How did it feel, Jonathan Sims?” his own voice asks, Knowing the answer. “How did their statements compare to mere human fare?”

Breekon. Manuela Dominguez. Peter Lukas. 

Jon hasn’t thought of it until now. He’d been busy marinating in his own guilt, sneaking fresh statements—he had only taken one for every ten impulses he felt in a week—and the limbo between hunger and abstinence had left him too muddled to think much on the ‘culinary’ experience. But he thinks on it now. And he thinks: 

“They felt better,” Jon says. The words are honest. The words are sharp. The words are like flints of toxic blades falling off his tongue. The words are making him smile, all on his own. “They felt like a high. Like I was smoking them as much as consuming them.” 

The smile curls higher and he finds he doesn’t care, not here, not now, even as he Knows that the smile is not one he would want someone else to see on him. 

It is not a kind look. It is not a sane look. It is not a look that any of his friends could see and convince themselves wasn’t proof-positive of Jonathan Sims being utterly replaced by the role he had invited into himself. He knows this, and if there is anything of Jonathan Sims left within him, it is sitting back in tired shock at this last, horrible skip into inhumanity.

Because the smile is only a symptom. 

Somewhere inside, there is another small, almost comical pop as the final barrier between Jon and his appetites turns to shrapnel. Appetites that are innately cruel; that exist for the sole purpose of inflicting and absorbing horror. His mistake had been assuming that such a hunger could only be fed by human misery. 

“They went down smooth and screaming,” Jon says, and is not surprised at the dreamy reminiscence in it. Nor even disgusted. He’s used the same tone when describing a particularly good dessert or—bitter, bitter thought—the exquisite cigar Jonah-as-Elias had shared with him to mark his promotion. “I loved it,” Jon says, and cannot find it in himself to pretend he’s lying, being forced to say it. There is no guilt here. “I loved it.”

The Eye who is Jonathan Sims leers back at him, nodding. 

“That is key to the Extinction as a Fear. The bittersweet knowing that whatever doom is on the horizon, it will hardly be wiping out anything that will be missed. Anything that doesn’t deserve to be wiped out for all its idiot evils and destruction.”

“Its hubris.”

“Yes. Though Fears have little in the way of ego to produce it, there are certainly avatars enough to tote it for us. Those who have waved our banners and lashed out at their opposites without ever explicitly being told. Except, perhaps, the Web. It has earned that pride, such as it is, being so skilled in its art. That aside, none of us will have any true personal sins to blame for our demise. We are not built for it. Though our natures dictate that we will fight against it. Action, reaction. Our followers have much more on the line than us and will go out far more afraid for their lives.”

“You talk like I’ve agreed to something.”

“You have, Jonathan Sims. You Know it.”

“But I’m still processing.”

“Yes. You are nearly done. State what you understand so far.” The eyes populating the walls glance down at the tape recorder, still running. “For the record.”

“I understand that the Extinction was born as a human Fear, but it isn’t any pickier than the rest of them. It doesn’t have to center on wiping out humanity. I understand that, if we’re looking at things objectively, it was the avatars and their patron Fears who took the most action in trying to prevent its birth. The ones most afraid of the Terrible Change. The-Future-Without-Us. 

“I understand that for the Extinction to operate in the world, it requires more than Fear. It requires hate. Hatred of self—of one’s own kind, knowing that we’ve brought it on ourselves, that we are our own ruin and we have earned the mess that will choke us.

“I understand that I felt no guilt whatsoever in preying on the monstrous. None. I rather enjoyed it. All the nutrition, none of the carbs. Ha.

“I understand that I…hate. Me. Them.

“I understand that I am not human. I can’t be. Not if I’m to successfully bring Extinction to my own kind. Is that about it?”

“Almost. You understand that the Extinction is a form of mass self-destruction. Thus far, you have operated only as my agent. The Eye cannot conquer all avatars, even if it can survive their power. We must survive in order for the other Fears to exist.”

“How can you be afraid when you don’t know to be afraid?”

“Exactly. If you are the linchpin of the Change, I am the linchpin of the Fears. Supporting it all, but simultaneously trapped by the spokes that revolve around me. To bring about an Extinction of the Fears, they must be brought down by aspects of themselves.”

“How would that work? Compel them to start hitting themselves? The avatars know my gimmick. God knows they were always quick to shut me up the second they thought a question mark was coming.”

“Compelling is a trick of the Archivist. The Archive can do more. The Archive is more. How did Jonah Magnus put it?” The Eye asks, Knowing. But it looks at Jon with the closest approximation of hope it can imitate. “Can you tell me, in his own words?”

Jon is on the edge of something now. He knows that he Knows where this is going, but he does not understand, not yet, but he is close. So close. He does Know what specific action the Eye wants him to attempt. Not the why of it, not the what-for of it, but…

Jon breathes. He is not afraid. Unhappy, yes, revolted, yes, but not afraid. Not of this. 

He concentrates, not just on the words of Jonah Magnus, but all of him, the unctuous, sadistic, rancid, body-hopping, world-violating, life-dooming bastard that he was, that he is, that he is, that Jon is—

“Because the thing about the Archivist is that—well, it’s a bit of a misnomer.” The words come out of Jon just as insidiously civil as the first time. Only now, it is not just the inflection of Jonah Magnus. It is the voice of Jonah Magnus. And more.

“It might, perhaps, be better named: the Archive.”

Jon looks at his hands. The Eye who is Jonathan Sims is still holding them, of course, but now those hands are no longer scarred, or even brown. They are well-kept, their lines showing the far end of middle-age, the nails clean, the skin white. There are tailored coat sleeves covering his arms and the polished gleam of a wristwatch peeking from under one pressed shirt cuff. There’s a whiff of pretentiously overpriced cologne. He does not need a mirror to know the rest. He feels the change as he speaks.

“Because you do not administer and preserve the records of fear, Jon. You are a record of fear, both in mind as you walk the shuddering record of each statement, and in body as the Powers each leave their mark upon you. You are a living chronicle of terror.”

Finishes Jon, who is Jonah Magnus. It is strange now, in his head. He is aware that he is Jon, but Jonah—a second edition copy of Jonah—is in there with him. Like a limb that has an opinion, but cannot help obeying what the mind wants it to do. Jonah Magnus’ face raises a silvering brow and frowns at the Eye who is Jonathan Sims.

“Well, this is…unexpected. Useful, I suppose, if you’re keen to see me throttle myself with my own two hands when the time comes. Though I suspect my,” Jonah makes a less than comfortable noise, “or is it his? End will be one of the messier ones on your to-do list once—,” A sigh. Sickeningly familiar. “Jon, I can feel you wanting to bash my head into the table until it cracks, but I feel I should remind you it is a joint custody deal we have going here and—,”

Jon plunges his/their head down. His/their nose breaks with a satisfying crack. Hot pain flares through the shattered bridge. Jon’s giddy to find that he isn’t feeling it. So he does it again. And again, and again, and again until Jonah Magnus’ face is all blood, bruise, and broken bone. Which, since it is really Jon’s, heals up nicely. What’s another scar or three?

Jonah Magnus spits blood and a tooth that is already, painfully, being replaced in the shared jaw.

“Oww! Christ, Jon, did you take up recreational masochism while I’ve had my back turned or w—,” 

Crack!

“Ow!”

Within himself, Jon giggles like a child. He’s about to go for another when he hears:

“Jonathan Sims.” 

Jonah Magnus who is Jon looks blearily across the desk. Jonathan Sims who is the Eye looks on patiently. 

“What do you understand now?”

“He understands—ah.” Jonah Magnus fades away, melting back into Jon. Only Jon. “I understand that I am the Archive. I am made up of all the terrors I have recorded. Terrors given to me as experiences, as stories. And I can take on those stories. Make them real again. Not wholly themselves, but enough for me to use. Like—,”

An impulse comes to him, and this time the change comes over him with hardly a shudder. He is suddenly taller, lean with muscle, spotty with eye tattoos. His nails are mottled with chipped black lacquer. A long, long, long-suffering sigh rattles out of him in a voice he’s heard only once before.

“Fuck’s sake, we get it, it’s like the goddamn Book of the Dead trick with the juice turned up. But where everyone and everything else in that horror show you call a brain gets to be second edition copies, or imaginary friends, or solid hallucinations, or whatever the hell you want to call it, I get the honor of being a goddamn third edition. First that shit with the daddy-daughter Hunting club, now this. Fuck me. Fuck you, first and foremost, Jon, but also, clearly, fuck me.”

Gerard Keay’s hands are too big to be held completely by the facsimile of Jonathan Sims’ hands, so he’s free to clench his own into fists. Then they unclench. Then they drum.

“Doesn’t hurt this time around, at least. So, you know. That.”

Drum, drum.

“…You got cigarettes in your little Scottish hideaway?”

Jon does. He hadn’t felt the urge to touch them after everything came crashing down. Seemed like a waste of energy.

“Yeah, yeah, I get that, but what kind?”

Hand-rolled.

“Huh. Not what you had last time.”

Couple’s activity.

“Ah. Fine, then, I’ll take them. All of them. You hear that in there? Yeah, you with the wax. Dibs.”

What? Oh.

Jude Perry does not emerge, but does make herself known. She boils like fever in the back of his mind, telling Gerry exactly where he can stick the lighter. 

Others are there too. Several others.

Jon doesn’t just Know. He understands.

“Took you long enough.” Gerard Keay shudders and begins to go. “Right, back in, then. Better get my own bunk in there, or I’m blaring every Ghost song I know at full volume between your ears, get me?”

Jon is Jon.

“Got it.”

Across from him, the Eye is still smiling with Jonathan Sims’ face. 

“Good.”

“I get the feeling our talk’s almost up.”

“Yes. Parting questions?”

“Yeah. One, I sincerely doubt that just because you’re looking forward to this new show and its ending you’ll make it easy for me. Us.”

“You suspect I will not block the Knowledge of this alteration from Jonah Magnus and any allies he may have. You are correct.”

“Of course. Wouldn’t be a proper fight against Extinction if no one knew to fight back. Two, you also won’t actively assist me any further than this point. What with me Knowing everything already.”

“Correct. Though I admit this particular exchange has been…approvable. Old already. Any discourses like it will be stale before they happen.”

“But..?”

“The novelty of similar imaginary conversations is not an inconceivable future event.”

“With or without the tape recorders?”

“Yes.”

“Right. Three, and this may be me pushing my very theoretical luck, but am I right in guessing you won’t be much help to the other avatars? Jonah, specifically?”

“I will be precisely as helpful to his cause as I ever was.”

Somewhere in Jon, he feels a sour twist of Jonah’s understanding. Flashes of centuries spent fruitlessly theorizing, ripping out his own eyes to flee from death, sans miraculous healing, and being generally abandoned to make guesswork out of the sheer vacuum of Knowledge the Ceaseless Watcher presented him with. Mindreading and the power of voyeurism had been it. Not that it hadn’t paid off in the end, give or take some outsourcing with the Spider, but… 

Jon feels another, remarkably hateful grin split his face. The Eye mimics him. He thinks—he Knows—it does approve of the parody of joy, even if the reality is out of reach.

“The exact amount of helpfulness?”

“Yes. No less, no more.”

“Well. Good to Know. Last thing, and I know I’m repeating myself, but: how does Martin get back from a Place That Isn’t?”

“I told you, Jonathan Sims. It is not a task that can be accomplished by you, or even a who.”

“If not a who, then a what.”

Jon Knows. Jon understands. Jon feels giggles that aren’t his rising up in his throat like poisonous helium. Jon’s hands are too long and too sharp to hold without the Eye’s hands bleeding.

“Goodbye, Jonathan Sims. I will be Watching. Make it interesting. Statement ends.”

Jon laughs like a headache, and walks out his door. 

Martin comes to at the sound of porcelain shattering. Between the nightmare—a thing of half-existence, impossibilities made flesh, a warping, Twisting, endlessness—he’d been snared in and the nightmare he now lived in, the sound was enough to send his heart ten feet out of his ribs. Failing that, the result jerks him up and awake from the couch with a yell.

“God-dammit!” His hand clamps to his chest, feeling the hammer of his pulse trying its best not to kill him. Wouldn’t that be a laugh? Dying of a heart attack in the middle of the apocalypse. He doesn’t quite have it in him to manage a chuckle. Instead, he steadies his breathing as best he can and searches for the source of the noise. “God, damn it,” he says again, this time a sigh.

The vase is broken. It had been such an eye-catching piece too, probably the nicest bit of décor in the whole rustic place. Granted, it wasn’t really theirs and he doubted Daisy was, well, well enough to be bothered with its loss, but still. It’d been nice.

“Wait.” Martin sits up, not sure he’s seeing things right. Wouldn’t be a shock these days, considering, but…

The shards of the vase are wrong. Their pieces aren’t in any kind of shape that would have resembled a vase when put together. These are all curled, crimped, crooked, corkscrewing bits of debris. 

“What..?”

“Michael will suffice. Even in this intriguing new state, Michael still applies.” The laugh comes then. A sound to make a brain fold in on itself in the effort to escape its noise. Martin turns.

There is a door on the wall that had never been there before. It is not a pale, sick-colored yellow, but a paler, sicker-colored green. Leaning at almost a dozen impossible angles against it is—

“Michael?”

“More or less. Welcome back, Martin Blackwood. Did you enjoy your respite in the Place That Isn’t? Some people really can’t tell.” Michael points a yard-long blade of a finger at Martin. “You seem like one of them. The lucky ones, that delude themselves into thinking it all a swirling trip into phantasmagoria. I suspect our Archivist,” a snicker full of nails and violin strings, “—pardon, our Archive, had a hand in that. It certainly wasn’t my hand, after all. All my hand did was open the right door.”

“You’re—you, you’re dead. You can’t be here, Helen took your spot and…”

“Ahhh, yes, Helen. I recall. I do believe we’re bound to have some words with her at some point. Not happy words either. Words to do with why she kept the secret of Jonah Magnus’ corpse to herself, why she did not simply rescue you from the hazy grasp of Peter Lukas, why she did not prevent the marking of the Lonely on poor, doomed Jonathan Sims, such as he was. I know why of course—I would have done the same, if I were me. It was terribly funny, after all. And what a payoff!” 

There’s a cackle that makes the room shiver like gelatin. One of their last good chairs stands up and scuttles away. 

“The Twisting is here with all its fellows, free to play and caper with you all. But alas…"

Michael touches the knife-point of his index to the corner of one eye and drags it down to mime a tear. His face tears open, bleeding colors from a spectrum that does not exist.

“All good things must come to an end. And, ha, perhaps it’s my new lot in life, but I really am rather excited to see how I fare against myself. My usurper, as it were. Oh, and it will certainly be a show if I get to spar with some of the more mundane powers. Do you suppose the Spider would be able to catch onto me before it realizes its spun itself into its own Web and begun drinking up its own organs? I do wonder.”

Martin is backing away. But he’s worried about the doors in the house. He suddenly can’t remember how many there are, or where they are, or where they all go. When he looks out the window, Jon isn’t there. Not on the swing, not in the garden. He doesn’t know if he should call out. But if Jon is here, he must Know this is happening, whatever this is. He’d be here if he could. So where is he? 

“Where’s Jon?”

Michael grins in a way that disorganizes his entire head.

“He’s right here. A little busy at the moment, playing referee to, oh, so many clamoring parties. He is ostensibly in charge of things, but we all know how well he handled playing boss to your happy band in the Institute. He does want you to know he’s sorry for the current confusion and that he’ll be down in a minute. A bit rowdy in there, you know, all those overblown personalities so used to being in the spotlight.”

“What? What does any of that mean? Where is he?”

“I told you. He’s right—,” Martin blinks and a finger that’s a lance is coming straight for his head. Until it isn’t. “—here.” Martin blinks again. There, speared on the atom-wide point of the digit, is a spider. It’s still twitching on its silk. “Mm. We’ll have to do something about you all, won’t we? He can flip a coin between Ms. Cane and Ms. Perry, I expect.” Michael hums and uses the rest of his fingers to neatly sever all eight legs from the arachnid before carefully, slowly, popping out its eyes. He flicks the rest aside like lint. “Everyone is so very eager to have a turn in the driver’s seat.”

“Look. Look. I don’t know if you’re actually trying to communicate something to me or not, but I—I am in no mood for whatever new game this is. I am sick of all this occult—eldritch—bloody weirdness that keeps trying to make life just a little more abominable than it was five seconds ago, okay? Sick of it. Now, you keep saying Jon is here, right? Where is here according to you, Michael? Where, exactly?”

Michael sulks at that. At least, Martin thinks that’s what he’s going for. His face seems melted in a satire of a pout. Even the Medusa coils of his hair seem unhappy. 

“I’m being as plain as I can be. Your Jon, our Archive—he’s quite literally right where I’m standing. Right—,”

Michael is gone. 

Jon is—,

“—here. I’m right here, Martin. So. Um. I know this is, ah, a lot. And I will explain all of it. Soonish. But I did promise Gerry that—,”

“Jon.” 

“Yes, Martin?”

“What the entire hell was that?” 

“Michael.”

“Yes, I know it was Michael. Why was it—why were you—Michael?”

“Because he was the only way to get you back from the Spiral. The vase—look, it’s a long story. I’d use Jonah to give you the abridged version, but I want to avoid the bastard as much as possible if I can—,”

“Jonah? Christ, what does Jonah have to do with this?”

“Nothing! Not, not really. That is, I’ve got a copy of him and—and some others, a lot of others who I Archived, and there’s this whole thing with the Eye, and the Extinction—,”

“What!?”

“What?”

“What about the Extinction!? What the hell did I miss, I was asleep for like, five minutes!”

“Well, I mean, you weren’t actually sleeping, but the Extinction is—well. I’m planning to, uh… Oh, this doesn’t sound great out loud.”

“What doesn’t?”

“You see, I’m—oh. Gerry, hold on, I can do this, you don’t have to…” Jon sighs. “Fine. They’re in the bedroom, nightstand on the left.” Just like that, Jon is spinning on his heel, tromping to the bedroom. And he is tromping. Jon can barely make a floorboard creak when he stomps, but now, somehow, there’s a distinct, thumping weight to each step. He lumbers.

The shadow on the wall isn’t his. Not a menacing shadow, not possessing any ill intent, but imposing all the same. It follows Jon into the bedroom and out of sight.

“Come on, then,” comes the call. It isn’t Jon’s voice. “Martin, right? You smoke too?”

Martin doesn’t answer. Just braces himself for whatever fresh madness is making itself comfortable in their lives. He goes into the bedroom. Jon is not there.

A very tall goth covered with eye tattoos is sitting on their bed, happily setting several of Jon’s cigarettes between the knuckles of his right hand. Once he’s got four lined up, he puts them to his lips, and uses Jon’s lighter to set them smoking. This stranger takes a long, satisfied drag on the whole fistful of them. He breathes out a cloud that, naturally, breaks apart in the shape of eyes.

“Our guy’s still a bit frazzled. He hasn’t had time to arrange everything into a nice, neat speech for you. Plus, he’s got all the other kids squabbling upstairs.” The hand not holding the cigarettes taps the side of his head. “He’s still smoothing things down, getting a handle on himself. Selves. Us. Whatever.” Another drag, another delighted sigh. “God, I missed that. You guys roll some good ones.”

Martin stares.

“Oh, manners, right.” The lighter is tossed aside to free up the non-smoking hand. He offers it to Martin. “Gerard Keay. Gerry to friends.”

Martin grabs the hand and lets it shake his. He doesn’t like how solid it is. How much it isn’t Jon’s. 

“Hi, Gerry,” he hears himself say. “Since Jon is still busy, would you mind telling me what’s going on?”

“Sure.” Drag number three. “Your boyfriend’s semi-possessed by doppelgangers of the monsters he’s sponged up with his Archivist powers, he had a chat with the Ceaseless Watcher in his brain, who happens to be so bored of its life that it’s ready to see all the Fears and their minions get subjected to a terrifying, agonizing genocide, including itself, just to experience one new thing before it finally dies. Courtesy of Jonathan Sims, sponsored by the Eye and the Extinction, natch.” Drag number four. “You got any chips here?”

“Our last bag turned into a sack of teeth.”

“Damn.” 

Jon returns once the cigarettes are burnt down to nubs. A very long talk is had as they go around the house, Martin pretending not to be disturbed by, one, just how many spiders there were in the place, and two, how quickly all their little webs and eggs go up into ashes as Jon uses Jude Perry’s hand to fry them. 

Too little too late, as it turned out, as word had already spread of some Terrible Change in the Archive. The Buried opens a pit under their house hours later, ready to swallow them whole.

Also too little too late. 

The house that falls into that chasm is filled only with a Lonely, stretching fog, and when it bursts open, the pit screams voicelessly as its comforting constriction is pulled apart, made wide, its crushing darkness deformed into a bleak grey, its agents and prisoners left to sprawl and curse their nakedness in the boundless non-place of the Archive’s Forsaken. 

Mike Crew, who is Jon, and Martin, who is exasperated, fall leisurely above the site for an infinite moment to admire the view. They land beside a door that is not there. 

Then Mike is Michael is Jon, leading the way inside. 

Times get very interesting after that.

Especially when, for the first time in Jonah Magnus’ knowing it, the Eye, the Ceaseless Watcher, his great patron, the Beholding, actually responds to him when he asks it what to do in the face of the Archive’s revenge, surely a traitor, a lunatic who would see them all destroyed with the coming of the Extinction.

The Eye regards Jonah Magnus, personally. 

And though it has no mouth, Jonah Knows it is grinning.


End file.
